“‘I can truly say that I have hardly ever been bored in my life… The only glimpse I ever got in my life of the hell of unbearable monotony, of something I felt I would rather die than endure, was in some of those films describing the fast and fashionable life of New York.’”
G.K. Chesterton in “The Unpsychological Age” in Sidelights, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 #4 (Jan-Feb. 2006)
Rasselas reflects on the difference between a beast and man. “’I am hungry and thirsty like him, but when thirst and hunger cease I am not at rest; I am, like him, pained with want, but am not, like him, satisfied with fulness. The intermediate hours are long and gloomy; I long again to be hungry that I may again quicken my attention.’”
Samuel Johnson The History of Rasselas
Re kids’ preference for bland junk food “It is a situation which I classify (along with most other aspects of domestic life) as desperate but not serious.”
Robert Capon The Supper of the Lamb
“The eighth mistake consists in the astounding, yet in our day widely prevalent, denial of human nature.”
Mortimer J. Adler, Ten Philosophical Mistakes
"Excuses are the nails used to build a house of failure."
Don Wilder, quoted on www.hound-dog-media.com/
“H.L. Mencken’s definition of the pessimist as a man who, if he smells a rose, looks around for a coffin.”
Matthew Scully in National Review October 27, 1997
“Happiness is a hard master – particularly other people’s happiness. A much harder master, if one isn’t conditioned to accept it unquestioningly, than truth.”
Mustapha Mond in Aldous Huxley Brave New World
“On ne devrait s’étonner que de pouvoir encore s’étonner.” ("The only thing that should astonish us is that we can still be astonished.")
La Rochefoucauld “Réflexions morales #384” in Maximes